Gander, Drupal's performance testing framework introduced in Drupal core 10.3 and implemented for Drupal CMS 1.0, is markedly improving Drupal’s performance. It enables performance testing to be integrated directly into CI systems — both Drupal's own Gitlab CI and your organization's preferred CI platform, as well as local testing — and has driven numerous platform improvements over the past 18 months.

Prerequisite
Attendees should be familiar with either the basics of Drupal module development, advanced site building, or web performance and scalability to get the most out of this session.

Outline
This talk showcases real-world front and back-end performance improvements in Drupal Core and Drupal CMS. We look at how they were discovered, how they were fixed, and the implications for performance on real sites, as well as recent and planned performance testing enhancements that enable them to be tested and verified.

Performance testing has allowed us to improve core web vitals via reducing page weight, as well as back-end performance with both cold and warm caches by improving cache hit rates, reducing database queries, and quickly finding unnecessary processing to optimize away.

We will cover topics such as CSS and JavaScript page weight and loading optimizations, Drupal’s render cache system, and how PHP Fibers is being integrated into core to solve long-standing cold cache performance issues.
Examples from the Drupal CMS development process will show how early detection through automated performance testing enabled quick, targeted fixes in time for the Drupal CMS 1.0 release. A similar approach can be adopted for contrib modules, site templates, and individual sites and we’ll briefly cover how this can be achieved.

Learning Objectives
Attendees will leave knowing about the some of the very latest developments in Drupal performance and scalability, with ideas on how to apply this to their own projects.

Experience level
Advanced